gentoo.org: The 2008.0 beta is roughly a month behind the original tentative schedule. A number of factors contributed to this, including the migration to new release processes, the usual delays that affect most open-source projects.

lwn.net: There have been some questions on the Gentoo lists about the unexplained delay in the 2008.0 beta release. What's going on is that two of the key developers involved have suffered a severe personal loss and are not currently able to work on that release.

blog.diginux.net: It has been actually over a year since my “Goodbye Gentoo” post. I have been wanting to get away from Gentoo for a long time now because of how the Gentoo community has fallen apart. It was bad a year ago, and it has become only worse. The number of developers that left Gentoo is astounding.

gentoo.org: Hello and welcome to the third issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter. Last month we ran graphical statistics on an experimental basis. While most of you think they're a good idea in general, there seemed to be general dislike for 3D pie-charts. We've replaced two pie-charts with bar-graphs, and made the remaining pie-chart two dimensional. We've also split the package addition and removal lists by week, in hopes of improving readability.

scienceblogs.com: It amused me today to see two blog posts, both about users switching from Gentoo to *buntu. The two authors I mentioned above gave up on Gentoo because of persistent problems with the package management system, Portage. Like the authors of the two posts, I recently switched.

evildomain.org: I am an advocate of Gentoo. Linux ricer? Sure, why not, I live for those minute speed advantages. I also, perhaps masochistically, prefer building every package from source. Why, then, am I dumping Gentoo, and for kubuntu of all distros?

kdubois.net: “Hello. My name is Kevin, and I’m a dpkg addict. Its been 3 days since my last apt-get…” Dpkg is the package management system for the *buntu’s and for Debian. I have had an itch for a little while to move away from downloading prebuilt packages. Why?

gentoo.org: New trustees for the Gentoo Foundation were just elected. The foundation takes care of Gentoo's intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks) and money. It ensures that nobody violates our copyrights and trademarks, serves as a place to hold money, and decides where to devote that money in the best interests of Gentoo.

Leftovers: Software

All the *mm projects now require C++11. Current versions of g++ require you to use the –std=c++11 option for this, but the next version will probably use C++11 by default. We might have done this sooner if it had been clearer that g++ (and libstdc++) really really supported C++11 fully.

I have just released version 1.13 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

MusicTube is a very interesting music player designed for multiple platforms using YouTube as the music source. It's not made for locally hosted music, and you can't add other online sources, but YouTube is a huge resource.

today's leftovers

Most of our services are in Go, and thanks to the fact that compiled Go binaries are mostly-statically linked by default, it’s possible to create containers with very few files within. It’s surely possible to use these techniques to create tighter containers for other languages that need more runtime support, but for this post I’m only focusing on Go apps.

Enabling Multipath TCP on the smartphone is the first step in deploying it. However, this is not sufficient since there are very few servers that support Multipath TCP today. To enable their users to benefit from Multipath TCP for all the applications that they use, KT has opted for a SOCKSv5 proxy. This proxy is running on x86 servers using release 0.89.5 of the open-source Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. During the presentation, SungHoon Seo mentioned that despite the recent rollout of the service, there were already 5,500 active users on the SOCKS proxy the last time he checked. Thanks to this proxy, the subscribes of the Giga Path service in Korea can benefit from Multipath TCP with all the TCP-based applications that they use.

On August 1, Artyom Zorin had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of his Zorin OS 10 GNU/Linux operating system, distributed as Core and Ultimate editions, based on Ubuntu 15.04.

I’ve meant to do this for ages, so on my first day of my “staycation”, despite vowing to myself that I wouldn’t look at a computer screen this week (hey, it’s not actually the technical start of my week off is it?), I fiddled this morning with BIND to try and avoid seeing ads on my devices. While AdBlock works great on my browsers, that doesn’t transfer well to mobile devices and apps with built-in advertising, etc.